Answer book controversy: Kashmir University says it is rectifying discrepancies

Srinagar, Jan 23: Day after the students’ protests, the University of Kashmir said on Tuesday that it has begun rectifying discrepancies in the answer sheets of the 1st semester college candidates.

Blaming the KU authorities for “callous approach”, the aggrieved students on Monday hit the roads saying that there had been a “flawed” evaluation of their mark sheets, which consequently, as per the students, had resulted in more than 90 per cent of them failing in the exam the result of which was declared on Friday.

Claiming “500-700” of the OMR sheets with discrepancies had been rectified already, Controller Examinations KU, Dr M Y Bhat, told The Kashmir Monitor that rest of them would be fixed in the next couple of days.

“We are first identifying the discrepancies in the OMR sheets. Accordingly, we will keep updating the rectified results of the candidates. We are going to issue the same through notifications immediately. We will keep issuing the figures on a daily basis in batches,” Bhat said.

Putting the blame on the students themselves for committing mistakes while filling their OMR sheets, Bhat said that the respective colleges had also not trained the students over filling the sheets “despite prior guidelines from the university” in this regard.

“The staff at the examination centres has also not checked whether the candidates filled the OMR sheets properly or not. The officials on duty have randomly signed the OMR sheets, as a result of which the answer sheets have not been read by the OMR machine,” Bhat said.

“Some students have darkened all the particulars except their question paper series, so in that case also their OMR sheets won’t be read by the machine,” he added.

Bhat assured the aggrieved students that they “need not to worry. We are at it, but it will take time as we have to identify the answer sheets with discrepancies out of a total of one and a half lakh of them”.

Asked why it took the varsity one and a half year to declare the results of the 1st semester students, the Controller Examinations said, “The examination itself was stretched inordinately long. Then it took us time to put in place the OMR machines as it was for the first time that the machines were introduced for evaluation”.